Things that go growl (and squeak) in the night

We already knew one of our cats was a mouser and when he caught a mouse in our home a year ago June, we were grateful for it. But something I haven't blogged about are all the mice he's caught since then...

Since this past spring, it's been the same routine, about once every 6-8 weeks: we wake up in the the dark - usually between 3 and 4am, but once as late as 5:55 - to the sound of growling on the little white rug beside the bed. Growling from our kitty only means one thing around here - mouse! And he'll keep sitting there, growling, until we acknowledge him. He wants us to know how awesome he is.

Light goes on, and indeed, kitty has a mouse in his mouth. If we make a move for it, he goes downstairs where we follow. Then try as we can to take it away from him, he manages to gobble it up. He's getting better at it. He used to swallow it whole, which always makes us worry he's going to choke. But lately he's learned to gnaw them in half first (natural toothbrush!). Once night, he presented us with a live mouse, so we were awoken by "grrrrrrrrrrrr.....SQUEAK SQUEAK......grrrrrrrrr.....SQUEAK." Then, after following him downstairs, we watched him finish the poor little critter off.

We're glad that, like most cats, he seems to want to show off his prize. It lets us know that we have mice. Because we wouldn't know any other way - we haven't seen or heard any sign of them.

But that's the problem, and the reason for this post. One mouse every month or two didn't seem so bad. Even though we didn't seem to have this issue until about 6 months ago, having an occasional tiny gray mouse - when we live in a suburb with a yard and trees and other outdoor critters - seemed like part of the package, along with spider crickets, spiders, moths, stink bugs, etc. But now, maybe because it's starting to get cold out, the frequency has dramatically increased. In fact, this week he caught a mouse on Wednesday and one last night. On Wednesday he was obliging enough to give D time to get a photo:

Do you think we need to call in professional help? Is this something exterminators would handle? Or do we need some kind of general contractor who would help us seal off our home? Because we don't really need help with the former. But since we aren't seeing signs of mice (until they're in this vicious beast's mouth), we have no idea where they're getting in, and they're so tiny the possibilities seem endless. 

We have to do something, don't we? Or do we just praise and reward our cat (who is probably having the best time EVER!) and let him continue to do all the work?

Haunted

Good title for a post around Halloween, right? Well for a few weeks we really were starting to think we had ghosts in our house. Earlier this month during the evening, we heard a loud, short burst of bass. Like a loud, vibration. It lasted for about 3 or 4 seconds and went away. Throughout the evening, we heard it a few more times - each time we would run around the house trying to figure out where the sound originated. At one point, we thought it was coming from our AC unit outside the dining room window. By standing near an AC vent, we realized that the short bursts of sound (varying from about 3 to 10 seconds) were accompanied by air coming through the ventilation. But the AC unit outside wasn't the source. At about the time we figured this out, the sounds stopped completely.

The thermostat was set to run the AC if the house got above 80, but the temperature inside was only about 75, so the AC shouldn't have been clicking on at all. But just to be safe, we turned the thermostat to "off."

Then late one night a few days later, I woke up to the loud, vibrationy whoosh sound again. This time from our bedroom, it sounded a lot louder than downstairs in the dining room. We realized it might be the blower, which lives in the attic eaves behind our bedroom. The sound haunted us a few more times that night, even though the thermostat was off. D crawled back to the blower and found a physical switch to kill the power - it completely turned the thermostat off and also the blower itself. Finally, no more noise.

I guess if there were an ideal time for a part of an AC system to break, October would qualify.

We called our heating guy (the same company who came half a dozen times a year ago to fix our heating problems). They came out a few days ago to diagnose the situation and found a fried relay in our circuit board. Of course they didn't have the part they needed, so they promised to order it and come back later. Fortunately, "later" turned out to be a few hours after their first visit - they were able to find the part they needed locally. $300 later, we have exorcised the ghosts from our AC system - it is on and behaving. We also got to keep the fried circuit board to take pictures because, you know, that's what we do here on Brave New Home:

More nursery details

A few more additions have added up to the nursery being almost finished, so after that short hiatus from nursery updates, here goes:

First, we needed a wardrobe, since we didn't have a closet in the room. We yet again turned to Ikea, this time to their Stuva series of children's furniture. We liked the silhouette of one of the floor models that created a step effect. So we knew what we wanted our base unit to look like:

The rest became a little more tricky and we relied on the detailed product list plus a few drawings of our own - this is what we finally decided on, after trying a few different combinations of drawers and closets (we realized quickly that drawers on the top left would be too high to be usable, for example):

Many many boxes later (each drawer is sold separately from each drawer door, each set of doors is separate, etc.) here's what it looks like:

(If you look really closely just to the right of the door, you can see we also painted and installed a cover for the electrical box.) So far, we have a few poles installed to hang clothes on, but we've avoided putting too much inside in terms of spacers and organizers until we see what we need.

Next update - the seating area. It just so happened that my parents have been holding onto a chair that they bought for me back when I was the one who needed a nursery:

I have no idea why I am wearing tiny baby bell bottoms...

We're not a fan of super dark stains on wood furniture, so my parents stripped it and sanded it down:

It's still pretty dark, but a little less glossy and fake looking. Any of the remaining color comes from the wood itself and from absorbing all that stain over decades. A few coats of satin Minwax polycrylic later, and it looks fresh and new, just awaiting a few cushions:

A few other updates to note in this picture - we spray painted the built-in wood shelves blue (and by "we" I mean D, since spray painting is so full of fumes and chemicals), bought a play rug to keep the chair from scratching the floor (thanks for the recommendation, ten), and also constructed the leaf canopy that I have literally been pining for since way before we were expecting a baby.

Speaking of rugs, one last update. Special thanks to kaitl365 for pointing out a few good 8x8 candidates on Overstock. I always hesitate to trust their quality, but the reviews for this particular rug were excellent and the colors worked perfectly, so we took a chance:

Love it! (As do the kitties!) Of course now that we have it on the ground, I see that I think we could have managed to squeeze in 2 more feet comfortably and gone with 8x10. Oh well, this works great and was way cheaper than our other choices. Now we just need to get a rug pad (the one we like on Amazon provides cushion but no non-skid, so we can't decide if we should get it and layer it with a rubbery pad or find an all-in-one - we'd like one a little more padded than the super-cheap ones we usually get just to hold our rugs in place).

We've been busy, haven't we?!

"Expedit"ed Storage

Our old Ikea Expedit has served us quite well, but the sad truth was that with only two standard square storage areas, it was mostly a place for dust collectors. And we needed more storage in our entryway. So when it came time to place the giant nursery order for delivery, we decided to throw in a new Expedit as well.

As always, we had our kitty assistant help us with the construction. Since the whole thing is constructed  almost entirely with little wooden pegs, we used a lot of wood glue for added stability (not on the kitty, on the Expedit).

The new pieces is 4 by 4, all standard squares, so we could mix and match Ikea's boxes and baskets inside. We ordered what we thought was the same color, but it turned out the color of our original piece doesn't exist anymore. This finish, "black-brown" is much darker than our old Expedit. The lighter color matched better, but this one still looks nice.

Standard sized kitties also fit in the cubbies:

Since the new Expedit was almost twice as long as the previous one, it threw off the balance in the room and caused the cedar trunk to hang out from the sofa by a couple feet - more than enough to cause bruised shins and make the living room seem cramped. We liked the idea of having something there to sit on to put shoes on, so we focused our search efforts on a storage bench. Nothing good came up on Craigslist or our standard stores, and we'd just about given up when I coincidentally discovered a storage bench sold at an online store I'd never heard of, Wayfair, in a home decor magazine while visiting my parents. We came home to find the measurements were perfect and put in the order - isn't it pretty?

See how much more storage we have in the Expedit now? The glossy doors and drawers on the Expedit are now permanent once we decided which cubes to nail them into. The baskets are obviously movable. We wanted to keep the left upper edge open to avoid closing the living room off too much, but we have the flexibility to change our minds later. Right now a lot of our household clutter is landing in the empty cubes, but somehow just having them in the cubes instead of lying around on other surfaces makes them seem less cluttered.

The next challenge - figuring out a good way to baby-proof and stabilize a piece of furniture that is not flush with any walls. We have ideas - they involve metal rods and/ or rope. Fortunately we have a little while  to figure it out during our sleep deprived state somewhere between infant and climbing toddler...

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Today marks 4 years in our house - and it's certainly come a long way since 2009. From when we bought to one year later in September of 2010, we focused on major painting and decorating, plus new windows. 2011 involved energy-efficient upgrades and some pretty significant work to our chimney. 2012 saw some pricy and exhausting changes, like the complete bathroom remodel, and the removal of almost all the liriope from our yard. 2013 was mostly about upkeep, and of course transforming our last un-decorated room into a nursery.

This next year will, for obvious reasons, keep us from doing any significant home improvement projects but we still have a few goals, both do-it-yourself and professional. I thought I'd make a quick list to see how far we get:

• Finish the nursery (duh)
• Get the light fixed at the end of our walkway and maybe get a new motion sensor for the back
• Continue to transform some of the wild area in the backyard to lawn
• Get a new basement door and some nice doors for the rooms off the main floor hallway

Thanks again to everyone for your help and opinions (and for continuing to read this blog long after its launch back in 2009)!

Rug time

We have a bit of a conundrum over rugs for the nursery, mostly because our room is basically square shaped. Rugs don't usually come in squares, at least not at the stores where we are looking. After years of cheap rugs in most rooms of the house - rugs that are now shredding and shedding - we want to get something that won't fall apart quickly. So we're willing to splurge a little bit and get something nice. But "nice" also apparently comes in a few standard sizes - 5'x8' and 8'x10' seem to be the two we are considering. Our current furniture placement has the crib in the middle of the room (we didn't want it against a window or a baseboard heater, leaving us few other options), so it will basically sit on the rug.

The problem is, the smaller size rug is mostly lost under the crib. This coffee table at my parents' house is a decent approximation of what I'm talking about. This rug is 5'x8'. The coffee table is a little smaller than the crib. So imagine something that goes a couple more inches closer to the edge on every dimension. This arrangement leaves us with a lot of extra exposed floor space and makes the rug seem almost pointless.

The 8'x10' configuration has the other problem. No matter which direction we orient it in the room, the 10' side extends almost to the very edge of the furniture legs or the baseboard heaters, with just an inch or two to spear, giving the impression of almost wall-to-wall carpeting.

Apparently, 8'x8' is perfect. And doesn't seem to exist.

On to the models we're considering.

If we go with 5'x8', this is an adorable, if busy, option by Crate and Barrel's children's subsidiary, Land of Nod:

Over the River and Through the Rug

Our thinking is that some of the business would be buried under the crib for now. Then when we graduate to toddler bed, we could push the bed against the wall and have the rug exposed for fun play time. Or maybe it would just look horrible and busy and clash with the mural...at least the blues and greens match the room decor.

A more safe design, available in either size, is courtesy of Pottery Barn Kids:

Lux Trellis Rug

Any ideas? Should we go with the smaller or the bigger size? If we go with the smaller size, which rug is a better choice, considering our already busy decor? No poll this time, but I could really use your opinions, so please leave a comment - especially if you have any other ideas, like places to buy quality kids rugs (which translates mostly into soft, pretty colors) in non-standard sizes (that won't break the bank)!

The Big Mural Reveal

Tah-dah! Say hello to my new jungle friends:

They are all plagiarized borrowed from various internet art sights that have been repeated so many times that I don't have a clue of the original source (if you search for "cartoon monkey" "cartoon parrot" etc. these are some of the top hits). And of course I added a few personal touches.

Here's a pictures from farther away, so you can see it more in the context of the rest of the room (see the grass down at the level of the wood trim?).

Let me briefly tell you about these two pieces of furniture too, since you can see them. We followed our normal process for furniture shopping: 1) check Ikea first and find some things we like, but decide we should branch out; 2) look around at other furniture stores and discover that we hate most other styles and the few that we do like are incredibly expensive (i.e we did not like the cribs sold at Buy Buy Baby and Babies R Us but we did like the ones at Crate and Barrel and Pottery Barn for, literally 6 times more); 3) check Craigslist and other used sites for used versions of the expensive furniture that we like; 4) eventually give up and buy at Ikea.

So the crib is Gulliver, in birch. The dresser - because we could not find a changing table we liked - is Mandal. It's actually the same furniture line as our bed, which we thought would give us some nice flexibility when we inevitably rearrange what goes where. Our bedroom and the nursery now share the same birch and white (and, for that matter, blue and green - though in very different intensities).

And our last reveal for the night - fishies! I extended the mural into a small underwater scene inside the window cubby:

Mural tease

Pictures of the nursery are still under lock and key until I can surprise my parents with it in person next week but I just have to say:

THE MURAL IS FINISHED!!!!!

The mural took almost two months and was a lot of work and may end up being the first thing to get painted over when our little baby is old enough to have opinions, but you know what? I don't care. It makes me smile when I look at it and makes the room feel special. And oh yeah,

IT'S DONE!!!!!!

Yes, I'm excited. I obviously wouldn't have done it if I didn't enjoy painting, but I'm really not much of a "process" person. I enjoy painting, cooking, baking, knitting, etc. because I enjoy the final product. So as much fun as it was to paint animals on the wall, it's must more fun being done and getting to look at it and not hate it (because that was a distinct possibility).

And it's not a moment too soon, because I learned yesterday after a particularly busy day out and about on my feet that I have reached the stage of pregnancy where I grow cankles if I'm not careful about sitting down and elevating my feet. No more climbing up ladders and painting for hours for me. Because as of today, (one more time):

THE MURAL IS DONE!!!!!

Garden progress

In an effort to avoid sharing our progress on the nursery so that my parents can be surprised when they visit in a couple of weeks, I thought I'd catch you up on the state of the yard, since it's been a few months since we last checked in.

Some flowers of what I can only assume are from the "wild flower mix" are blooming:

One of our fancy red tiger lilies made an appearance. The flowers closed up and looked dried up and dead each night and then came back each morning. The leaves came up on the other side of the walkway but never sprouted any flowers.

Our Asian lilies were big and dramatic:

We actually had a surprisingly robust strawberry crop, considering this was the plant from last year. We put the planter in the breezeway and largely forgot to water it all winter, and yet it came back happy. The chives in the same planter came back too. This, basil ,and parsley (and the thyme and peppermint that we have in the ground), are our only homegrown items this summer. We couldn't be bothered with the ones that take more effort like tomatoes or cucumbers.

After none of the bare root black-eyed Susans we planted last year came up (I really have bad luck with bare root plants), I got impatient and bought some full-grown ones at Home Depot. Hopefully they come back up next year. This is my second attempt at buying full-grown black-eyed Susans. To be fair, the ones that I planted a few years ago accidentally got gobbled up by the rototiller when we were ripping up liriope, so I can't really blame them.

We planted a small plant that we bought at a county fair, called Strawberry Seduction Yarrow. It turns various shades of red and yellow:

Our butterfly bushes, while still puny compared to some, are growing a lot more than they used to.

 And they're living up to their name:

One hydrangea plant is thriving (relatively) and the other right next to it, not so much:

But we got enough from the one plant to convince me that it was ok to cut some off for our table (usually I hate to take flowers off the plant, because I want to continue to enjoy them outside in the yard where they won't die as quickly):

And my clematis finally made it's way up to the top of our lamp post! I've been trying for years to get a climbing plant to get there to no avail...until now!

Largely, this summer the garden has cared for itself. I'm seeing far less liriope than previous years, meaning that we finally made progress in ridding our garden of the horrible grass infestation. Plants are coming back - and coming back happier than in previous years. The grass in the front yard stopped looking stellar once the weather turned hot and dry. The back is doing pretty well still. This has led us to conclude that we might need to stop using a shade/sun mix in the front and switch to full sun. I always consider our light "dappled" but the grass has other ideas. So this fall when we do our annual compost spreading/overseeding (by "we" I mean D, since being so pregnant by then buys me a free pass), we'll try using a different seed blend.

But lest you think we're not continuing to work hard at keeping things looking nice, take a look at what we set out for pickup not too long ago:

So yes, even with all the nursery decorating, we haven't forgotten about our curb appeal.

Cutting it down to size

J's old desk chair was obtained from some random big box store. It's a wobbly ill-shapen mess that has become increasing fragile due to the over-use of cardboard in its construction. We've kept it for so long for a simple reason - J's desk is a very odd height. It's counter-height, but with a drawer below it. So, it's effectively halfway between a counter-height chair and a dining room chair. Which is not a common height.

During our many trips to Ikea to pick out baby furniture we found that the new Ikea INGOLF was, at least by eyeball, about the right height. So we bought it, figuring that if it was too tall, we could always cut it down.

After bringing it home and building it, we found, of course, it was about 2.5 inches too tall.

So, out came the mitre boxes, rulers, tape, pencils, and wood saws. First I taped off the legs (hoping to reduce splitting of the veneer when sawing), then I marked off 2.5 inches from the bottom of the feet on all sides. It was tricky because the legs are curved.

I then got the bottom of the leg at a right angle to the side of the mitre box. Just with some eyeballing. I was very concerned I would be cutting the legs off at an odd angle, but I didn't have a good idea how to cut it to precisely 90 degrees. 

I had two wood saws, with about the same saw tooth shape and size. But one only got through about 1/8 of the leg with 60 seconds of furious sawing, while the other got through the entire leg in less than a minute.

Did this three more times and was relieved to find that the chair was mostly level, despite my sloppy measuring and cutting. I then chamfered the bottom edges of the feet with a Dremel, so they would be less likely to split in the future.

The boss approves.

Little Details

No additional mural progress - real life, vacations, work, etc temporarily took over. But I should be back to that soon. In the meantime, sharing a few other small touches we've added to the room over the last month or so.

We painted the insides of the shelf nooks blue. It will be a lot darker when we put the top shelf back on - for now it almost looks like a different color on the top and bottom shelf (it's the same paint - just the sun is hitting the top shelf), which now makes me wish I had thought to do that myself. My plan is to paint little fishes in there.

We painted the attic cubby doors with magnetic primer and chalk board paint:

We rolled two coats of a very well shaken and stirred Rustoleum Magnetic Primer (seriously - the instructions even say to have it professionally shaken and then use immediately, since it takes very rigorous stirring and shaking to get the metal pieces distributed through the paint) followed by three thin coats of their chalkboard paint. It's tintable to a lot of fun shades but we specifically wanted the classic chalkboard gray look.

A lot of reviews said that the magnetic primer wasn't very effective and, indeed, it doesn't seem like it will be able to hold up alphabet magnets or anything heavy. But it can hold up a sheet or two of paper with a pretty strong (but not necessarily "super strong") magnet:

I should mention that the "we" here really is just D. Both these paints are most definitely not low VOC and they reeked of stinky fumes. I kept away and we aired the room out for a while before I made my way back in.

And finally (for now) we ordered these adorable elephant switch and outlet plates off Etsy - further making me think that elephant curtains might start to be a little too much...

Furniture is on the way and more mural work is coming. Stay tuned!

Happy Little Clouds

You'll have to bear with me as I continue to go on and on about the nursery. We actually have some fun yard pictures to share too, but I'm on a roll here and excited to show you all our progress.

First an update on the Curtain Poll - if you haven't voted yet, please do. I have to admit I went into the whole thing almost sure of which fabric I liked best. And it isn't the fabric you like best. And while I reserve the right to choose mine over yours, your convincing arguments are changing my mind (for the record, I like the blue and green elephants, so it was still a popular choice). I think the simpler design of the yellow stripes might be the way to go.

Next onto the good stuff. My cloud dream has come true! After a few hours dragging the ladder around the room and dabbing on paint, I have a pretty sky ceiling.  I read a lot of how-to guides on the internet and it turns out there are about as many "how to paint cloud" websites and strategies as there are clouds. There is no standard set of colors, tools, or techniques. So I picked a few ideas I liked and got to work.

Step one, for me, was mixing white and the blue ceiling paint to make a subtle base layer. I put this on gently and sparingly with a large, very dry brush. It was so pale that I thought it would be helpful to mark the clouds with painters tape, but the tape kept falling down anyway, so I gave up on that strategy. Right away, I ran into the small problem of deciding which way to orient the clouds (most clouds in the sky are at last in part parallel with the horizon, but of course I had no horizon). I decided to have them all sort of face different directions, with a vague orientation towards the sun lamp in the middle of the room.

 After step one, this was the very subtle result. I let that dry for a little while.

An hour or so later, I was dabbing on pure white paint with a sponge, for the highlights (i.e. where the sun would hit the cloud). I think the fact that the ceiling is a flat paint and the white is a semi-gloss also helped the clouds stand out. I didn't take a picture of this step but basically it made it a lot easier to see the clouds and gave them some depth.

That took a little a little extra time to dry, since it was a little thicker than the first layer (but still not "three-dimensional" - I tried to apply very little paint so that there was no actual texture that would one day complicate an attempt to repaint the ceiling white).

Finally, the third layer was a little bit of gray mixed with white (I actually used Sherwin William's Knitting Needles, our living room paint, that has slightly warm undertones). I dabbed this below the white highlight areas for shadows.

Here's the final results, taken with D's much better camera and much better skill than the two pictures above:

Love love love it! The ceiling isn't as blue as I would have liked (this picture actually makes it look more vibrant than it is) but the whole effect is probably much better this way - much more subtle. Now that it's done, I find myself staring at my own bedroom ceiling thinking how boring it looks....maybe time to add a few happy little clouds?